Moto Roader MC is Super Sprint with missiles and a naked lady
I honestly feel like I don’t need to write anything else about Moto Roader MC than what you can already see in the headline — because from that headline you almost certainly know whether or not this is going to be a game for you. But professional integrity — and an inherent wordiness that has been part of my personality since a young age — precludes me from leaving it at that. So let’s take a closer look!
Moto Roader MC is another release from Ratalaika Games’ range of retro ports for modern systems. Like the other recent releases in this series Gynoug and Gley Lancer, Moto Roader MC was originally the work of a developer called Masaya; this time around, however, rather than having its origins on the Mega Drive, this was a PC Engine CD title.
Specifically, it was the third installment in the Moto Roader series, the first of which can still be enjoyed today on the Wii U’s Virtual Console (at least until that shuts down) and on the PC Engine Mini hardware. The series was always noteworthy for offering five-player competitive top-down racing action, and Ratalaika’s new rerelease is no exception to that rule.
However, Moto Roader MC differs from its two predecessors in that rather than unfolding from a zoomed-in, scrolling top-down perspective — with Micro Machines-style “catch up” for those pushed off the edge of the screen — each track is instead presented as a single, zoomed-out, non-scrolling fixed screen.
This is an approach taken by many classic arcade racing games in the mid to late ’80s and early ’90s, including Super Sprint, Super Off-Road and Indy Heat, because it was inherently suitable for allowing players to crowd around a screen and play together. Indeed, one of the earliest examples of the genre, Atari’s Sprint (the predecessor to Super Sprint, as you might expect) even had a version that allowed eight players to encircle a central screen laid flat!
Ratalaika’s new port of Moto Roader MC can be controlled in two different ways according to your preferences. The default setup sees you pushing left to turn left and right to turn right, regardless of your car’s current orientation. This is typically how home ports of top-down racers were controlled in the absence of arcade machines’ free-spinning steering wheel controllers, since it allows the freedom to move in more than the 8 directions of digital joypads and joysticks.
But these days we’re no longer restricted to 8-way controllers; today we have analogue sticks, and as such a tap of the X button allows you to switch to a control mode where you steer simply by pushing the analogue stick in the direction you want your car to end up facing. If you’ve played any of the top-down racing games in Code Mystics’ excellent Atari Flashback Classics compilation, you’ll be right at home with this control scheme; once you get accustomed to it, it provides a feeling much more akin to classic “driving controllers” and allows for much more accurate, precise control.
Besides steering and, of course, accelerating and braking, the cars in Moto Roader MC are also armed with two types of weapon: missiles which fire straight ahead, and pipe bombs which are dropped out of the back, exploding after a moment of rolling. Neither of these weapons are limited, though there is a very brief cooldown between one shot and the next, meaning you can’t just rapid-fire your way to victory.
The weapons aren’t intended to destroy, either; instead, being hit by one simply causes a temporary loss of control, but rarely enough to put you in an unwinnable situation unless you make a real hash out of recovering. They’re balanced very well, in fact, and add some additional tactical depth to an otherwise simple and rather straightforward game.
Where Moto Roader MC really shines is in its track design. Across five themed championships with five courses each, you’ll be taking on a range of different challenges from fairly conventional racetracks to weird and wonderful, fantastic environments — including, yes, one which features a naked lady in the bath. Some tracks even make creative use of colour-coded entrance and exit portals, requiring you to not only learn the best way to steer around the hazards on the course — but also exactly where on screen you’ll end up after disappearing into one of these!
None of the tracks are designed to be so fiddly that you’ll be constantly bumping into the walls — Super Sprint was always bad for this in its later stages. Instead, you’ll find each and every race is enormously, thrillingly competitive, whether you’re playing with friends or against up to four computer-controlled opponents. Final results are usually very close, and it’s delightfully common to see spectacular comebacks from those in a disadvantageous position — solo players will be pleased to note that the AI is prone to making pleasingly “human” mistakes at times, usually as a result of getting a bit too aggressive with one another.
Alongside the five-race championships of the Race mode, which can optionally be played in themed sets, shuffled completely randomly, played as one of three preset playlists or set up in your own custom order, you can also play single races, incorrectly described as Time Trials. There’s also an “Omake” (“Extra”) mode, which is actually a “car football” game for two or four players — sadly, this can’t be played completely solo against AI players, but it’s a fun diversion if you have some friends to enjoy it with.
Moto Roader MC’s appeal for the solo player is undoubtedly fairly limited; there’s nothing to unlock and no real incentive to replay beyond trying to set better times in the game’s Records menu. Sometimes you don’t need an incentive, of course, particularly when the core gameplay is as straightforwardly fun as it is here — but it’s clear that Moto Roader MC is designed to be best enjoyed with friends. And if you get the right group of people together for a full five-player match, you will have an absolute blast with this.
In other words, it’s a great fit for Switch in particular — and if you’re in the habit of getting friends over for some couch gaming, this should absolutely be part of your library. Solo players may wish to consider it more carefully before buying — but at six quid, it’s not exactly a costly mistake to make if you don’t end up liking it as a single-player experience!
Moto Roader MC is available now for Nintendo Switch, with PlayStation and Xbox versions to follow. Thanks to Ratalaika for the review code.
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